New York tax filers reporting more than $375,000 a year in earned income may end up paying nearly 60% of their wages in taxes to the government under a Barack Obama presidency, economists who have analyzed his plan said.

The Democratic presidential candidate is proposing not only raising the federal income tax, but also adding a Social Security tax for those Americans earning more than $250,000 a year. For New Yorkers, that could mean that if the current Social Security rate is applied, the marginal tax rate, or rate on every extra dollar earned, could rise to 58%.

"This is a very eye-popping number," a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Alan Viard, said. ...

Some observers said that raising taxes at a time when the economy is teetering on a recession could exacerbate the economic woes. "If the economy remains soft through next year — and it seems unlikely that it will be robust — it would be a very bad time to raise taxes of any sort, but particularly to raise them in this way," a professor who teaches federal tax law at Yale Law School, Michael Graetz, said. ...

For the full calculations of these figures, see the slideshow accompanying this article.